A Curve Like the Curve of a Buttock
Posted: October 6, 2015 Filed under: Art, Photography, Prose, Writing | Tags: Ali Smith, Ana Regina Nogueira, buttock, extract, Francesco del Cossa, Grete Stern, how to be both, literature, man booker prize, Martin Parr, nude, summer reading Leave a commentMore from How to Be Both by Ali Smith, because it’s full of wonderful things:
“I feel the loss, dull the ache of it cause I had it, the place where his legs met his body, the muscular dark where his tunic flared up in the breeze as he went, I had it like telling the oldest story in the world cause there’s a very pure pleasure in a curve like the curve of a buttock : the only other thing as good to draw is the curve of a horse and like a horse a curved line is a warm thing, good-natured, will serve you well if not mistreated.”
Dream Nº 16. Grete Stern. ca. 1950
Photograph showing unidentified male nudes on the beach. Photographer Unknown. Date Unknown.
Ana Regina Nogueira from series Olhos n’agua
Life’s a Beach. Martin Parr
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Grete Stern
Posted: December 26, 2013 Filed under: Art | Tags: 1940s, black and white, drowning, eye, Grete Stern, hands, look, photomontage, reach, waves Leave a comment
Photomontage (Dreams) by Grete Stern.
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Sueños/Dreams
Posted: November 25, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: Argentina, Buenos Aires, collage, dreams, family, feminism, Freud, Germany, Grete Stern, husband, Idilio, lamp, Latin American Art, MALBA, men, metaphore, photomontage, psychoanalysis, sueños, Surrealism, turtle, wife, women 1 CommentFrom 1948-1951 German-born Argentinian photographer Grete Stern was commissioned to create photo-montages for an Argentinian romance magazine called Idilio. On the basis of descriptions sent in by its female readership she visualised 143 dreams for the series “Psychoanalysis Will Help You“, working in close collaboration with the sociologist and psychoanalyst Gani Germani, who directly advised her on how to depict certain dreams in a Freudian way. Stern had less than a week for each collage, drawing on her archive of landscape photography and using relatives and friends as models. Germani would then refer directly to the collage when analysing the dreams in the magazine.
Stern often presents family as a deathly, alienating force completely inverting its traditional role. Men invariably appear menacing, be it as a direct physical threat in form of a monstrous macho with a tortoise head or as a commodifying force, transforming the female into a usable object, as in ‘Dream 61′ where the woman is the base of a lamp which is about to be switched on by a man. And then there are the obvious, and metaphorically heavy-handed, collages where the female protagonist is trapped in a literal cage, in a corked glass vessel, or beneath a net thrown at her by her husband.
Text from The Argentina Independent
Dream No. 61. Grete Stern. 1948.
Dream No. 5 (Bottle cast into the sea). Grete Stern. 1949.
Dreams. Grete Stern. 1949.
Dream No. 28. Grete Stern. 1951.
